Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Truth (2015) [R] ****

A
film review by Mark Olsen for the L.A. Times, on Oct. 15, 2015.

Is
swift-boating still part of the
common lexicon? The political and cultural climate has moved far and fast since
the skirmishes of the 2004 presidential election, a time the movie Truth looks to re-examine.

Adapted
by screenwriter James Vanderbilt in
his directing debut, the film is based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power,
by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes,
who after the success of reports on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal attempted to
untangle the convoluted history of then-President George W. Bush's military
service in the Air National Guard in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The
60 Minutes II report that aired in
September 2004 was based in part on documents whose authenticity were
immediately called into question, creating a furor that led to Mapes being
fired and paved the way for the resignation of Dan Rather from CBS News.

Truth is a movie curiously
in conflict with itself. There is a constant shift between granular detail and
big-picture sweep that the movie never fully resolves, as serious discussions
of type fonts and spacing between lines and letters on the military documents
fit awkwardly with musings on what-it-all-means.

Mapes'
book and Vanderbilt's screenplay present the incident as a harbinger of the
deeply divided and contentious climate in which the news is now delivered each
day, and a demarcation point regarding the importance of journalism along with
the intersection of the Internet and media ownership.

Truth might all be a bit
dry were it not for the sparkling performances by Cate Blanchett as Mapes and Robert
Redford as Rather, who provide two distinct approaches on movie-star
dynamics. Blanchett attacks her role while Redford lets it come to him. There
are also fine supporting performances from Dennis
Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Topher Grace, Stacy Keach and Bruce Greenwood. Noni Hazlehurst
delivers a devastating monologue as the wife of the man who first delivers
suspect documents to Mapes.

Vanderbilt
is best known as the screenwriter of David Fincher's Zodiac, another film dense with historical and factual information.
Fincher as a director was better able to handle the sheer volume of data in
that story, letting its weight provide momentum, with a nimble grace that Vanderbilt
is unable to bring to Truth. It is
not hard to wonder if Truth the
screenplay might have rang its bell a bit more clearly in the hands of another
director, another set of eyes and hands to distill the material.

The
film plays best as a forensic procedural leading up to and receding from the
fulcrum point of the September 2004 broadcast of that now infamous story on
Bush's National Guard service, an examination of how the story came together
and how quickly it came apart. (A subsequent internal investigation by CBS
found that the disputed documents could be neither verified fully nor
discounted completely.) For anyone who knows what is to come after the
broadcast, a number of early scenes on the reporting of the story feel like
moments just before a car crash, where in retrospect the accident could have
been avoided, but in the moment it is coldly inevitable.

The
post-broadcast investigation builds to a magnificent series of scenes in which
Blanchett as Mapes spars with a panel made up of the privileged and elite,
delivering a feisty declaration of principles that is uncynically the stuff of
awards-season clip packages. Blanchett has become such an otherworldly screen
persona — having played Cinderella's stepmother, a queen, an elf, a delusional
socialite, Katharine Hepburn and Bob Dylan — that seeing her play an ostensibly
regular person now feels unusual. Blanchett still brings a regal bearing to her
earthy depiction of realness, her tousled hair flicked precisely as to always
be perfectly imperfect.

Redford
is an unusual choice at first in the role of Rather and the actor doesn't
change his hair color or seemingly make much effort to look like the real
television newsman. But eventually Redford's own presence and understated charm
take hold and the actor doesn't so much inhabit the role as simply make it his
own, bending it toward his own gravitational pull. It's a trick of hiding in
plain sight — at some point the actor stops reading onscreen like Robert
Redford as Robert Redford and suddenly is Robert Redford as Dan Rather.

The
film ends with Rather's final broadcast and there's a slow-motion glamour shot
of Redford that is jarring for the way in which it seems to enshrine both the
actor and the character as some sort of new Mount Rushmore of rustic Americana.
The moment is odd for a number of reasons, feeling outside the tone of the rest
of the movie, but most of all for how it shoves Mapes to the side of her own
story.

Even
as the film clearly conveys both the how and why of the mistakes made in
reporting and airing the Bush National Guard story — mistakes that also shed no
real light on the veracity of the story's core claims — there are no ultimate
conclusions to be drawn from Truth.
There is no smoking gun, deathbed confession or definitive answer; rather there
is a web of shifting perspectives and conflicting motives. And for a movie
about contentious recent history and the contemporary media environment within
which that history is being written, that air of conflict and uncertainty may
remain the most genuinely honest result one can expect. [Olsen’s rating: ***1/2
out of 5 stars]